Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "PBS Terra" channel.

  1. We'll probably adapt, I'm just not entirely sure what percentage of the human population will have to die before we do it. It kinda traces to another very uniquely human problem, which is that of inequality. There are countries all around the world which are going bust because you have a tiny percentage of the population holding something between half and 2/3rds of the riches of the entire nation. This has been practically ruining their nations, and yet we see no changes. At some point this will turn into bloodshed and wars, which might or might not be the turning point for those societies. So, going back to climate change, I think human resilience tells me we're going to adapt somehow. But the price of it has yet to be determined. I personally think the price will be higher than most people can even imagine.
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  2. Absolutely against it. Geoengineering and terraforming. The reason is even more basic than the explanation given - Climate Change itself can be interpreted as... geoengineering. It was produced artificially by us because we didn't understand the consequences of changes done by us, even though we had the best of intentions. It's likely the biggest evidence of how wrong things can go if we embark in messing with worldwide reaching changes without knowing the consequences of it. The absolute minimum threshold for geoengineering projects is right on our faces already - managing to solve the Climate Change crisis. That's it. If we can reverse Climate Change, that would prove that we might be able to reverse adverse consequences of geoengineering projects, and it also would give us a frame of reference for the costs. So, we are putting the carriage in front of the horses. The chances of geoengineering projects screwing our situation even more is just far bigger than the opposite, because this has been already been proven by our past actions. So, it's just playing dice with the future of our planet. Now, there are plenty of people willing to do it - I'm not one of them. If you want more evidence on human attempts of messing with natural systems with a presumptuous mindset that we fully understand how it works, there are many to see out there in preservation, conservation or restoration projects. People just need to do an extra effort to learn from history. Reality of the thing is, we have over and over and over again been put down in our theories about understanding natural systems. A good doc that I have in mind right now to think about this problem is Adam Curtis' All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. I always recommend everyone to watch this series.... it can be quite depressing, but it's also humbling, which is something that I feel lacking nowadays. Too many people affected by Dunning-Kruger with too much money doing stuff that affects all of us. One of the episodes explains how once upon a time, when the term "ecosystem" was coined, we went through the illusion that we understood natural systems by making it analogous to computer systems, using logic and trying to "solve" it by gathering as much data on them and trying to find out logical patterns to explain how they worked. It was applied in strategies to recover close to extinct populations of animals in certain regions of the world, plus other initiatives It all failed because we did not have all the data, the natural world did not work in predictable logical ways, and it was impossible to compute everything, particularly the chaotic way the entire system worked. It was folly. We made things worse with the best intentions because we didn't actually understood it. And it was not a matter of computational power or work put into it - it's just something we might never have the capability to fully predict and understand.
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